Atlanta: Morality Without Gods: Possibility or Fantasy?

[redwinter]

MORALITY WITHOUT GODS: FANTASY OR POSSIBILITY?


Monday, March 16th, 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Georgia State University Speaker's Auditorium
(in GSU Student Center, 44 Courtland St SE, Atlanta, GA 30303 - click here for directions (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=44+Courtland+St+SE,+Atlanta,+GA+30303&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=us))
Hosted by the GSU Revolution Club ([email protected])


At a time of broad controversy and debate over religion - on a scale unprecedented in recent times - Sunsara Taylor, Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Samuel, and Martin Cowen will have an exchange on the question of God, morality, and the role of religion in society.


Is religion a creation of humanity whose time has long passed?
Or does it serve some deeper need of human beings?
Are beliefs in gods obstacles or pathways to understanding and changing the world?


Everyone is welcome to attend this event (you DO NOT have to be a GSU student). It is open to people of all faiths and lack thereof. The event will consist of presentations and debate on the topic between the three panelists and will be followed by a question and answer session from the audience.

This event is part of a nation wide book tour with Sunsara Taylor. She is promoting Bob Avakian's book Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. Avakian is Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. You can read more about the book and the tour at www.awaywithallgods.com (http://www.awaywithallgods.com/).

Description of Panelists:

Sunsara Taylor - Advisory board member of The World Can’t Wait (http://www.worldcantwait.org/), writer for Revolution newspaper (http://www.revcom.us/), and an uncompromising atheist. Sunsara has recently been on a national campus speaking tour on the book Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World by Bob Avakian. (www.awaywithallgods.com (http://www.awaywithallgods.com/))

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Samuel - Pastor of Victory for the World Church in Stone Mountain, Vice-Chair of the African American Leadership Council of the People for the American Way.

Martin Cowen - Founder of the Fellowship of Reason. Founded in 1998, the Fellowship of Reason is the world’s first and only reason-based moral community.

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Spread the word!

Help promote this event: stop by the Revolution Club table in the GSU courtyard between 11am and 2pm every day from now till Monday to pick up flyers. Flyers will also be available at Revolution Books (http://rbo-atlanta.blogspot.com/) in Little 5 Points (1089 Euclid Ave NE, inside the Four Corners Market).

Also, make sure to forward this email and invite your friends on Facebook and MySpace:

Facebook event listing: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=57505927594
MySpace event listing: http://event.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.detail&eventID=495110.71368

The GSU Revolution Club will also be having a planning meeting for this event on Wednesday night (3/11) from 7:00pm to 9:00pm in the GSU Student Center, Room 260 (Dalton Suite). Everyone is welcome!

Any questions, comments, suggestions, etc, please send to [email protected] Your opinions are appreciated.

[Kassad]

But when will we have time to bow down to Chairman Avakian with all these festivities going on? :rolleyes:

[RedStarOverChina]

Way to go, Sunsara. I hope she does a good job.


It's not always about Bob Avakian. In fact, I'm not sure who's more obessed with Bob Avakian here: Sunsara or Kassad?

Though by no means a supporter of either RCP or Avakian, I would be proud to call Sunsara a comrade.

[Kassad]

Obsessed with Avakian? Please. At least be the rational and average stereotype and tell me I have a fetish for Lenin. The entire Revolutionary Communist Party revolves around Avakian's ideology. On the main page, there are links to his website, multiple quotes from him and an array of links, sound files and other assorted Avakian-related things. There's also multiple cases of people being exiled from the party due to refusing to totally comply with Avakian's cult and his wishes. Are you finished?

[Panda Tse Tung]

Wasn't this the event where like thousands of flyer's we're printed reading: 'morality with gods'. Or something similar :p.

[Trystan]

And Mao said unto him: Praise be to Avakian, for he hath smited the Gods.
And ye transgressors, ye hath the blood of the revisionists and the Trot goat.
And Mao asendeth into heaven. So sayeth the manifesto of Truth.

[redwinter]

This event is mainly to promote a dialogue around religion and morality, flowing from the deep dissection and refutation of religion made by Avakian in his book, Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World (http://www.awaywithallgods.com/). I haven't seen anyone here (as of yet) write about the need for this kind of debate to be out in society in a big way like this...

Avakian's new communist synthesis is essential for revolutionaries today to grasp, apply, and build on. Some of you in the peanut gallery want to joke about cults etc., but for people who want to make revolution and end this criminal system, Avakian's re-envisioning of socialism and communism is a welcome development (even as many will debate what their thoughts on it are).

Mao Chi X: Interesting to note that information about the Georgia State Revolution Club's activities is making it to the Netherlands ;). Actually it wasn't thousands of flyers, but a novice graphic designer made a typing error on the first few masters that were made for the event. Pretty funny regardless...and needless to say this was corrected before thousands were made.

[Kassad]

Bullshit. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is a Marxist-Leninist party that honors the revolutionary contributions of Marx and Lenin to economic and scientific thought, but we don't plaster links and quotes from them all over the main page of our website, nor do we use their ideological contributions as the sole contributor to our ideology. Every piece of Revolutionary Communist Party dogma, important writing or party philosophy is written by Bob Avakian. I do like how you conveniently ignored the objections to the Avakian cult by former ranking members, but ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

[Comrade_XRD]

Seriously Avakian is one to be watched. I'd be careful giving that guy an ounce of power. His ego goes through the damn sky. One look at his website (the church of avakian), proves that he's leading a cult.

[AvanteRedGarde]

Mao had a cult. So did Stalin. And Marx and Lenin. And Fidel. There are plenty of other current left parties that operate on some level of a personality cult. Hell, the democrats pushed a cult of personality to get Obama elected.

My question is, what exactly is the point? Are the RCP's (or Avakian's) politics good or bad?

[Panda Tse Tung]

Interesting to note that information about the Georgia State Revolution Club's activities is making it to the Netherlands http://www.revleft.com/vb/../revleft/smilies/wink.gif.
Like 95% of my American contacts (on MSN) are from Georgia :p (Cause i visited it once).

[Buster Flynn]

"Every piece of Revolutionary Communist Party dogma, important writing or party philosophy is written by Bob Avakian." Well, that's quite an assumption, isn't it?

What if Bob Avakian is actually a committee, and he's in deep-freeze, like Disney or something? I mean, if none of us have seen him... how would we know? That autobiography? What a perfect cover!

Maybe I've just been reading too much Philip K. Dick lately. Avakian, the Red Yancy... :laugh:

[Kassad]

Well, that ignorant bubble of yours is cute, but if you examine the website for the Revolutionary Communist Party, you will see how much of their party platform and principle are based on things Avakian wrote. Also, people have seen Bob Avakian. He attends a small amount of World Can't Wait rallies.

[KC]

This event is mainly to promote a dialogue around religion and morality, flowing from the deep dissection and refutation of religion made by Avakian in his book, Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.awaywithallgods.com/). I haven't seen anyone here (as of yet) write about the need for this kind of debate to be out in society in a big way like this...

Why doesn't he ever put these books online? It seems to me that he is more concerned with selling these books than propagating the information contained within them. I'd love to read this but I'm not going to waste my money on it (especially because most of his books are rehashed basic Marxism written in an incredibly off-putting manner).



Avakian's new communist synthesis

What is "new" about anything he's ever written?

[Kassad]

What is "new" about anything he's ever written?

He's a modern writer. That's about all that can be said about his 'updated' theories and such. In truth, if you see modern Marxist writings as a 'new synthesis' of communist theory, all of us are promoting a 'new synthesis.' As we both know, the Revolutionary Communist Party has forged a cult around Avakian and they openly admit that he is their 'leader.' I understand that there are those with merits and abilities that surpass others in some fields, but there's no reason we should say that someone is our leader. They may be a comrade, a friend or a hell of a good writer, but I will never submit my responsibility as a revolutionary and say that someone else is leading me. Good to see we see it the same way, KC.

[AvanteRedGarde]

Do you think PSL doesn't have leading committees? By supporting PSL, you are implying that this committee is leading you. What exactly is wrong with having a leader? Almost every Maoist party internationally has identified leader?

Avakian just happens to have a better line than Maitreya.

[Buster Flynn]

Gosh, it's just some literary allusion, chill out. Also, I call the RCP 'the Bob people,' and I figure in the end, you just gotta let Bob be Bob, and Bob people be Bob people. If that fact is accepted, they are all fine comrades. If not, then maybe people are too hung up on the trees to see the forest... or what's left of it.

Seriously though, do we need to be so uptight? Isn't that part of what got us so far in the cultural margins? (in America anyways, your mileage may vary...) "America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood..."



Well, that ignorant bubble of yours is cute, but if you examine the website for the Revolutionary Communist Party, you will see how much of their party platform and principle are based on things Avakian wrote. Also, people have seen Bob Avakian. He attends a small amount of World Can't Wait rallies.

[Kassad]

Listen, you people are totally missing the point. Honestly, one of my biggest problems with the Party for Socialism and Liberation is the fact that they see every issue in black and white. No moderate ground, no gray area. I despise that. I'm sure much of our leading committee has promoted that ideology, but a primary point of being a revolutionary is realizing that you don't have to subscribe to anyon'e dogma or anyone's teachings. A leading committee is made up of an array of people and they don't claim to be leading anything. At least, Socialism and Liberation's committee doesn't claim to be leading anything. Also, if you go to our website and observe the pages for 'Fundamentals of Marxism' and 'Theory', you will find that almost every article is written by someone different, which means that if these people are all on a leading committee, it is at least twenty or thirty people strong. They claim to be managing the party's affairs in the most innovative, efficient manner and I don't see what's wrong with that.

I really enjoy the Revolutionary Communist Party's work, but truly, they all appear to worship Bob Avakian. Observe the main page. Quotes everywhere. Texts calling him their leader. Links to Avakian's books, Avakian's recordings. He is not just seen as a person best fit to organize and produce texts. He is viewed as their leader, which by definition, would assume that he is leading people. That means that there is a hierarchy in the party and the entire point of communism is eliminating this hierarchy. Yes, there will always be basic members and there will always be those who are in charge of other duties in the party, but no one should be leading anyone. We should be united together in revolution, not petty party politics.

[AvanteRedGarde]

I really enjoy the Revolutionary Communist Party's work.... We should be united together in revolution, not petty party politics.

Then why'd you bring up this issue in the first place?

[Kassad]

Because you can't fucking unite a movement when a sect of it is praising individuals as leaders; contrary to everything we should stand for. Leadership is totally bourgeoisie, for at the end of the day, any 'leadership' position could be filled by an average worker with the proper education. Executives, teachers, presidents. It's all the same. Some people will be better suited to doing certain things, but never should someone be placed on a pedestal like Bob Avakian is.

[AvanteRedGarde]

So we shouldn't try to find unity with the RCP??

You are saying two different things here

[AvanteRedGarde]

And again on leadership. The PSL has leaders. Obviously you are not writing their Theory and General Program. Someone is though.

Don't think I'm trying to defend the 'genius' of BA either. His new synthesis is a rehash of Mao, with a bit of Trotskyism, and a lot of added unnecessary words. I'm just trying to figure out why you really are so anti-RCP. Let's be real, their program- albeit with Bob's leadership and some trivialities- isn't much different from PSL.

( To clarify, I'm actually more sympathetic towards PSL. They seem to have a better line on the national question. Also, RCP's 'niether islam or imperialism' line is completely bankrupt. My point is, who cares if they are a cult. Hell, Mao had a bigger cult than BA could ever dream of.)